Marked 2 tips: Long-form reading with Marked

Marked 2 is great for live previews while you write Markdown, but it’s also very handy for reading long form articles. There’s a variety of themes to choose from and many features for quickly navigating through long pieces.

The easiest way to read a blog post or web article in Marked is to grab an article to your clipboard using Marky or Bullseye, open Marked 2, and type Command-Shift-V to preview the contents of the clipboard. If you want to store an article permanently (and have nvALT), just drag a URL to the notes list in nvALT and hold down the Option key to convert it to Markdown.

Here’s a list of Marked 2 features you quite likely don’t know about. For full information on all of Marked’s features, see the help guide in the application, or visit it on the web.

Reading

Pick a theme that suits you. The built-in themes include a variety of styles that cater to multiple preferences for line-height, font and other tastes. You can add or build your own custom theme if nothing suits you.

Adjust the text size with Command-plus and Command-minus. Reset with Command-0.

To auto-scroll (in any theme except for Multi-column), use “s” to begin scrolling and Shift-left/right arrow keys to adjust the speed. Escape or “s” stops scrolling.

In full screen with a custom style this actually makes a pretty good Markdown teleprompter.

Set bookmarks while you’re reading long articles by using Shift-# (any number 1-9), and return to them pressing just the number you picked.

The bookmarks only persist while the file is open, but they’re handy when you want to skip ahead and then return to where you were.

You can navigate multiple bookmarks in sequence. Use “n” and “p” to go to the next or previous bookmark in numeric order, and use “N” and “P” (Shift-n/p) to navigate in page sequence.

Navigation and keyboard shortcuts

For an overview of these single-key shortcuts at any time, type “?” in the Marked preview.

“j” and “k” move up and down (or left and right in Multi-column), as do the arrow keys. Standard Spacebar navigation works, too, with Space moving a page down and Shift moving a page up.

Shift-J and Shift-K will move in larger increments. Hold them down to scroll quickly and smoothly through an article.

“u” and “d” will jump by a half page, up and down.

“t” or “gg” will go back to the beginning of the article, and “b” or Shift-G will go to the end.

The new “zoom out” feature is handy for scrolling quickly. Just type “z” and scroll to the point you want, then press “z” again to return to reading mode.

If the article or long-form piece you’re reading has sections with headers, you can use the Table of Contents to quickly jump around the article. Open it quickly with Command-T.

You can also navigate headers in sequence with “,” (comma) and “.” (period). This navigates all headers in page order.

To jump only between top level (H1 and H2) headers, hold down Shift while using the same keys (“<” and “>”).

Search

To quickly find a location in an article, you can use search.

Open search with Command-F or “/” and type the words you’re looking for.

Use Enter or Command-G (next match) and Command-Shift-G (previous match) to navigate the results.

Wildcards make matching different conjugations and pluralizations easy. Use “*” to match any sequence of letters, and “?” to match one character. For example, “m*down” will match Markdown and MultiMarkdown.

Use the checkboxes to turn on “whole words only” and “case sensitive” matching.

Advanced search

Selector search is very handy on longer pieces:

Start your search with an asterisk (*). Enter a CSS-style selector such as “*h2” or “*figure>figcaption”. You can search for text within the matched selectors by including a word or phrase in quotes after the selector. To find all image captions with “Alice” in them, you would use

*figcaption "alice"

You can also use jQuery/CSS3 attribute selectors

If you happen to know regular expressions, you can use them without ticking the checkbox by just surrounding your search terms with “/” (e.g. /\bPol.*/).

Multi-column

If you haven’t tried this theme, it’s great for long-form reading.

Press Command-3 to switch to the Multi-column theme.

Adjust your window width and it will adjust the text into easy-to-read columns formatted for the current width, and the overflow continues horizontally.

If you use “j” and “k” to move forward and back it will always snap to column edges (like turning pages).

You can pick up a free trial of Marked 2 at Marked2App.com, and buy it for $11.99 US. Happy reading.